Elie Wiesel Quotes

I've always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But the worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from His mercy. ... Or it may be a private bargain between me and God, that if I give up this one thing I want so much, however bad I am, He won't quite despair of me in the end.

I'm a sinner just like everybody else and I have my faults and I've been through my dark times in my life to where I wasn't walking the walk and talking the talk, or I may have been talking the talk, but I wasn't walking the walk.

I had many friends to help me to fall; but as to rising again, I was so much left to myself, that I wonder now I was not always on the ground. I praise God for His mercy; for it was He only Who stretched out His hand to me. May He be blessed for ever! Amen.

It's easy to lose sight of God when life is sweet and easy, but there is something awesome about despair, and it is the closeness of God when we are at our weakest.

I can see now that I should have been strong enough to conquer myself.

If you fall seventy times a day, rise seventy times and return to God so that you will not fall too often.

The devil put before me that I could not endure the trials of the religious life, because of my delicate nurture. I defended myself against him by alleging the trials which Christ endured, and that it was not much for me to suffer something for His sake; besides, He would help me to bear it.

Above all the grace and the gifts that Christ gives to his beloved is that of overcoming self.

The struggle between God and man breaks out in everyone, together with the longing for reconciliation... God does not love weak souls and flabby flesh. The spirit desires to wrestle with flesh which is strong and full of resistance. It is a carnivorous bird which is incessantly hungry; it eats flesh and, by assimilating it, makes it disappear.

Men are not born saints with special gifts and privileges. They fight against the world, the flesh and the devil, and as they conquer, the spirit of Jesus begins to shine through with more clarity.

There's always a ying-yang in life. With everybody. There's evil in all of us. It's just about how you balance out the evil and the good and having faith in yourself and how you carry yourself.

Fading, fading: strength beyond hope and despair climbing the third stair. Lord, I am not worthy Lord, I am not worthy but speak the word only.

The lower you fall, the higher you'll fly. The farther you run, the more God wants you back.

The sad thing is that many of us come to Christ because we are sinners, and then spend the rest of our lives trying to pretend that we are not!

The inner life must overcome the flesh or the flesh will overcome and destroy the inner life.

True wisdom comes from the overcoming of suffering and sin. All true wisdom is therefore touched with sadness.

If we are going to live as disciples of Jesus, we have to remember that all noble things are difficult. The Christian life is gloriously difficult, but the difficulty of it does not make us faint and cave in, it rouses us up to overcome.

When I was a child, I was raised Catholic. Somewhere, I didn't fit with the saints and holy men. I discovered the monsters - in Boris Karloff, I saw a beautiful, innocent creature in a state of grace, sacrificed by sins he did not commit.

I partly know why I have not led a perfect life like other believers. But I avow to my Lord, and I do not lie, that from the time when I first knew him, the love of God and the fear of him has grown in me from my youth so that I have, by the power of God, always till now kept the faith.

God didn't give up on me. I am somebody in God's eyes... Let me be a prime example of how I've been through the storm and the rain, and I made it over.

A lot of Mexican Catholic dogma, the way it's taught, it's about existing in a state of grace, which I found impossible to reconcile with the much darker view of the world and myself, even as a child.

Sometimes it looks like God's abandoned you, but not for any reason. To make your faith grow and to see that, no matter what happens, you come out OK... It's all for your good. It's all for love, and it's all for making you a strong person.

I'm a practicing Catholic. And faith is very, very important to me. It was pounded in my head as a kid, and I hated it. And I sort of lost my way in my 20s and part of my 30s and then found my way back. And I don't know what I'd do without it. It's huge in my life.

It is axiomatic that the Cross we get is the one we most dislike: we would choose any other. But it is equally true that the Cross which is ours is the one Christ wants us to bear.

I must consider myself as the man of the cross and love the one that God gives me without thinking any further.